1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a photographic printer with an improved processing performance enabling no waste of photosensitive material, and to a photographic printer exposure method.
2. Description of the Related Art
There is a well known technique of temporarily storing image data of each frame of a negative film scanned by a scanner in an image memory, and reading the image data from the image memory and displaying it on a liquid crystal panel, and thus, exposing the displayed images, equivalent to several frames, on photographic paper which is used as a photosensitive material.
Moreover, there has been developed a photographic printer which can make an index print. The index print is made in such a way that each frame is arranged in a matrix using the image memory and the liquid crystal panel, and then, is scaled-down and printed, and thus, it is possible to readily check what photographs were taken in a roll of developed negative film.
The photographic printer is provided with a conventionally existing primary exposure section for directly exposing an image recorded on a negative film onto a photographic paper, and a secondary exposure section for exposing an image stored in an image memory onto the photographic paper. These primary and secondary exposure sections are arranged parallel with each other along a feeding path of the photographic paper. The index print is arranged on the photographic paper rearward of all the frames of the negative film.
In the primary exposure section, various size prints are made. For this reason, when exposing an ordinary size print in the final frame, there is a gap between the final frame and the index print, in essence wasting the photographic paper in this gap portion.
Accordingly, when making an index print, for example, of six exposures that make up a sheet of an index print, two or three exposures are printed before the final frame exposure, and the final frame is then printed. Thereafter, the remaining portion of the index print is exposed, resulting in there being no waste of the photographic paper.
However, when starting the exposure of the index print after the final frame has been exposed, it is possible to perform replacement processing of a negative film during the exposure of an index print, so that processing performance can be improved. This serves to improve the performance of the photographic printer when carrying out continuous processing. Namely, in order to improve processing performance without wasting the photographic paper, it is very effective to enable the photosensitive material to be transported in reverse so that the exposure of the indexprint is started after the final frame has been previously exposed.